From the archive, 9 November 1987: A time to mourn, but also to listen

The cenotaph at Enniskillen: 11 people died on Remembrance Day on 8 November 1987. A twelfth victim died in 2000 after 13 years in a coma. Photograph: Empics

Mr John Hume, the Nationalist leader in Northern Ireland, described the bomb which exploded at the cenotaph in Enniskillen yesterday as the most deeply provocative act to have been committed against the Unionist people. That is not an overstatement. If legitimate targets are to include civilians remembering their fallen relatives, then few people can expect to be given quarter by those responsible for the bombing. Whether this was an authorised attack by the IRA or the work of a splinter group anxious to remind the IRA of what it should be doing is, at present, speculation. The effect is the same: to try to raise tension to breaking-point.

It may seem sanctimonious advice from the safer side of the water, but Unionist people would do well to reflect on the warning by Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, who understands their predicament as well as anyone, against the politics of the last atrocity. (We in Britain have not been guiltless of that gut response.)

The aim of a terror campaign such as that waged by the IRA, and when the time is deemed right by the "loyalist" paramilitaries also, is precisely to fill people with anger and despair. They will then, it is assumed, consent to anything which gets the terrorists off their backs. To that extent, the more offensive to all human feelings the act of terrorism is, the greater the revulsion and the more effective it is judged to be in achieving its purpose. If the Queen and half the Cabinet had been assassinated in Whitehall yesterday, the IRA would have claimed its targets to be justified as upholders of the British presence in Ireland and would have relied on a "Troops Out" backlash. Where there is no politician in the sights but only a few bystanders within bomb range, a purely emotional backlash has to serve.

It would be foolish to go to the other extreme and say that the outrage in County Fermanagh was a sign of the bombers' desperation. It is not. There is no cause for the IRA and its like to be desperate. They have a willing supply of young recruits stretching far into the future, and despite setbacks, even as grievous as the loss of the Eksund arms cargo [sent by Colonel Gaddafi in Libya to the IRA], they will always have the weapons to cause havoc. The only way to stop the IRA and its clones is to pull the rug from under their feet by co-operation between peoples and governments, and in that order people come first.

It is at times like this that the few statesmen in Northern Ireland most need to be heard. Mr Hume has been saying for years that the only form of Irish unity which counts will come from dropping the idea of domination by either side: of Nationalists by the Unionist majority in the North, and by Nationalists in the island as a whole. This advice has not been totally ignored. It inspired the idea, and to some extent the report, of the New Ireland Forum, and it was the spirit behind the Hillsborough Agreement, which is now almost two years old. Frictions between the governments – about the adequacy of security co-operation in the South, about forms of justice in the North – are bound to surface, and it isn't always crystal clear that either side is wholly right. But these frictions are subsidiary. Governments cannot make agreements of that kind stick. Only people can do that. The only threat at present to the existence of the IRA and other violent forms of republicanism would be the sense among Nationalists that they have benefited from the agreement and, among Unionists, that they have lost nothing of importance. It requires less effort in Britain than in Ireland to say so, but if that could be the starting point for meetings between the parties then the bombers of yesterday would have fewer places to hide.

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